DigitalOcean is laying off staff • Hacker News Board

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#211

Post by Proziam » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #185

biztos wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a "droplet" going at $7/mo for about half a year and probably used it less than ten hours so far, and not doing anything too heavy when I use it. Every time I think about turning it off I say "yeah but it's only $7 and I like to ssh into it sometimes." I've had a "shared hosting" setup on Dreamhost for at least 15 years, also using pennies per month in capacity, at most. I get that it can be a brutal, low-ma…

I’ll never forgive DigitalOcean for deleting my portfolio site after 5 weeks of nonpayment. 5 weeks. Deleted everything. Yes, I screwed up. But I would have happily paid them. They deleted the backups too. When we inquired as to whether the backups could be restored now that we’ve paid them, they said it was impossible. Blame me if you want and say it’s my fault. It certainly is; I admit that. But why was I paying th…

The other folks here are giving you a hard time, so I'll just say I actually see things differently here. Things get overlooked, card expiration dates being one of them. Deleting a backup after such a short time is really poor form. Especially because these backups only exist because people need contingencies for machine and human error. Sending a threatening email 'fix your CC in 60 days or everything goes bye-bye' is preferable for almost everyone in this situation, and the difference in cost to DO would be negligible.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#212

Post by rc_kas » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

wakatime wrote: post #108

WakaTime switched to DigitalOcean and we're loving their performance to cost ratio. Their compute droplet machines are much better than AWS ec2[1], especially if you need low-latency SSD IOPs. The only AWS services we still use are S3 and Route53, because S3's performance is better than Spaces[2]. Really hope this doesn't spell bad weather ahead. [1] DigitalOcean Droplets > AWS Ec2 (based on our production metrics) […

Ya. S3 is awesome but everything else on AWS sucks. I have AWS and only use S3 and nothing else.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#213

Post by treebornfrog » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

Thank you for writing here in the thread. I was literally looking at options to migrate, but now I can sleep with ease.

All the best, love DO, simple + clean and get's the job done.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#214

Post by JDiculous » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #196

JDiculous wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is AWS so profitable then?

They charge you for everything . Data transfer in: charge, data transfer out: charge, DNS lookup: charge, storing a file: charge, etc. It's one of those situations where it's a death by a thousand cuts. When you're cost provisioning, you can figure out the big stuff, i.e., we need 25 EC2s m4a.2xlarge instances with 40TB of S3 storage, and a 2TB Aurora instance. But once you get the bill, you start seeing the costs of…

This is why I don't use AWS for personal projects (S3 is the only one I'd consider using). EC2 for example is significantly more expensive than a Digital Ocean droplet.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#215

Post by neovive » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

raiyu wrote: post #199

yowlingcat wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the response! Are you at liberty to say a little more about the competing directions that, for lack of a better term, didn't win out? How will these changes impact customers, and could folks be left stranded in any way?

There is no impact to customers now or future. The changes were mostly internal in how teams were structured and was the result of leadership changes that happened. From the customer perspective we have never launched a product and then killed it. Anytime you are dealing with infrastructure and building services that other companies rely on for their business you have to be very sure that whatever you launch you plan…

As a long-time loyal customer, I just want to thank you for your honesty and for providing such an excellent service to developers for so many years. Keep up the amazing work and best wishes for continued success.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#216

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

abinaya_rl wrote: post #25

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#217

Post by brobinson » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

timfrietas wrote: post #30

djsumdog wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital Ocean is pretty similar to Vultr: they offer a straight easy API for starting up VMs and managing DNS (I've written a tool that uses both of their API[1]; been meaning to do a post on the differences). It's kinda nice because you're just putting up VMs and there's not the type of vendor lockin you get with AWS/Azure/Google. That being said, DO is obviously trying to compete on that scale now. It has managed d…

You mean Vultr is pretty similar to DO :) When I worked at DigitalOcean all we could do was shake our head and laugh at how blatantly hard Vultr tried to copy what we did.

They've been better than DO for many years (since at least 2015) on pricing, performance, and locations.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#218

Post by robryan » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #185

biztos wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a "droplet" going at $7/mo for about half a year and probably used it less than ten hours so far, and not doing anything too heavy when I use it. Every time I think about turning it off I say "yeah but it's only $7 and I like to ssh into it sometimes." I've had a "shared hosting" setup on Dreamhost for at least 15 years, also using pennies per month in capacity, at most. I get that it can be a brutal, low-ma…

I’ll never forgive DigitalOcean for deleting my portfolio site after 5 weeks of nonpayment. 5 weeks. Deleted everything. Yes, I screwed up. But I would have happily paid them. They deleted the backups too. When we inquired as to whether the backups could be restored now that we’ve paid them, they said it was impossible. Blame me if you want and say it’s my fault. It certainly is; I admit that. But why was I paying th…

How long to hold it for though? If say 90% of customers that haven’t paid for 5 weeks end up never paying that is resources they will never recover the cost for.

What they could do is work out some high restore cost which makes the numbers work on holding all that data for longer.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#219

Post by ogre_codes » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

kickopotomus wrote: post #124

jandrese wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess iCloud is hosted on AWS? I never actually looked. It doesn't seem to be that big of an issue for Apple though. And if it did happen I guess that wouldn't be so bad, I mean it could be worse. Oracle could decide to get into the cloud business by buying out DO.

If I remember correctly, iCloud is actually hosted by Google.

This was never the case. They are self hosted and for a while they hosted a fair bit of data on Azure & AWS. Not sure if they still use Azure and AWS, but iCloud has never been on Google's infra. (Other Apple content has been served by Google at various times, maps being the big/ obvious one)

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#220

Post by tekkk » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

JDiculous wrote: post #178

Meekro wrote: post #54

Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan. That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave b…

How is AWS so profitable then?

AWS has few services that I imagine yield massive margins with not that much cost to them, which can mainly be justified by the services being pay-per-use and having a small overhead for the customers. And then, I believe most of the AWS's profits come from its enterprise customers which they have plenty of (who aren't in turn that price-sensitive as long as they see profits from their end).

DO on the other hand from my experience has been catered towards small businesses or hobbyists who simply just don't bring that much money vs even a one giant company will bring. And since DO doesn't have all the goodies of AWS, it can't really directly compete with it for those big customers.